Re: Lawful Access articles - collection

If you assume that the recurring cost of $6.7 million a year is primarily for extra government paper pusher employees for C30. Using a load labor cost of $100k to $150k a year, this means somewhere between 40 to 60 people.

Even if 70% of the people are analysts, you are only looking at 30-40 people to look at all the new raw data. That number doesn't seem enough. Pretty sure that CSIS, RCMP etc would need to hire more people to parse through the data.

If you assume that the recurring cost of $6.7 million a year is primarily for extra government paper pusher employees for C30. Using a load labor cost of $100k to $150k a year, this means somewhere between 40 to 60 people.

Even if 70% of the people are analysts, you are only looking at 30-40 people to look at all the new raw data. That number doesn't seem enough. Pretty sure that CSIS, RCMP etc would need to hire more people to parse through the data.

I'm pretty sure that they don't actually want to look at the data just yet.What they want is a Canadian equivalent to TIA - John Poindexter & the NSA's Total Information Awareness.

>With longish light-brown hair and gray-speckled goatee, he looks more like a bouncer at a country music bar than an ex-federal prosecutor, let alone the guy responsible for safeguarding and investigating Facebooks 845 million users.

>Most of his security team is based at headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. and sits at clusters of desks close enough to take dead aim at one another with Nerf darts. Broken roughly into five parts, the team has 10 people review new features being launched, 8 monitor the site for bugs and privacy flaws, 25 handle requests for user information from law enforcement, and a few build criminal and civil cases against those who misbehave on the network;

The biggest issue is - should a law like this exist in the first place?

If one should, then the way the law should have been written would to have included this as its first two operative statements after the definitions/preamble section......

1) No provider of telecommunications shall provide any personalized customer information to any person, company, body, agency, or any level of government - domestic or foreign - without first being presented a warrant duly executed by a judge of competent jurisdiction under this Act.

2) It is incumbent upon the provider of telecommunications to verify the warrant has been lawfully issued by contacting the jurisdiction under which it has been issued within 2 hours of receipt of the warrant. Absent confirmation within 72 hours of receipt of the warrant, the telecommunications provider must not release any information to the requesting party.

Seeing that the police and AGs really want this capability vis a vis C-30 so they can join the club of other countries who have the ability to spy on all of their citizens, I can only imagine what their next request for expanded powers will be?

I believe its an 'envy' thing. I modestly propose that a bill C-31 be introduced to complement C-30 which will likely be bull-dozed through Parliament while we are all enjoying the summer this year.

Bill C-31 - The Lawful Interrogation Bill (short name - The Bill To Protect Us From Curb Side Car Dealers Selling Bad Cars, or words to that effect).

The bill will lay out the methods of torture, er interrogation methods the police will be allowed to have to extract confessions and gain information not stored on a computer but held within our minds: Repeated tazering for suspicious people at the airport, water-boarding for jay-walkers, electro-shock treatment for red-light runners, the rack for protestors, flaying for those identified writing negative comments against the police and government in the Globe and Mail, etc.

Torture used to be a legitimate investigative tool in the middle ages and not something for someone's sadistic amusement. Other countries have this capability and our police and AGs are probably envious and likely lobbying for it behind closed doors right now. Why shouldn't we have this ability?

If C-30 gets passed we will already have ceded our constitutional rights, and therefore we must demand C-31 n'est-ce pas?

Seeing that the police and AGs really want this capability vis a vis C-30 so they can join the club of other countries who have the ability to spy on all of their citizens, I can only imagine what their next request for expanded powers will be?

America's Present IS what Canada's future will be.(No rights,Checkpoints,NDAA,etc..

"If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pretend that we can tell the world how they ought to live." -Ron Paul

A cyber attack on the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police's website has only bolstered the organization's support for the government's controversial online surveillance bill, a spokesman said Saturday

While the organization doesn't keep sensitive information about court cases, it does have databases on senior police officers, he said.

In a new video, hacker group Anonymous says they're giving Vic Toews seven days before they reveal a new scandal about the Public Safety Minister.

"Anonymous has warned you this is only beginning," says the video. "Over the past several days, we have been inundated with messages exposing all manner of political wrongdoings and personal scandals, some of which extend to the very highest levels of your government."

"There is a very real possibility that after the revelation of this incident, Mr. Toews, that public outrage will not be necessary for you to find yourself without a job."

Conservatives in minority on Bill C-30

A majority of Canadians think that the Conservatives proposed online surveillance Bill C-30 is too intrusive and should be defeated, according to a poll by Angus-Reid.

The poll, conducted February 23-24 and surveying 1,011 respondents on the polling firms online panel, found 53 per cent of Canadians believe the bill is too intrusive, compared to only 27 per cent who believe the it is necessary to fight online criminal activity.

Even a plurality of Conservative voters, or 47 per cent, thinks that the bill has gone too far. And considering that opposition to the bill is strongest in the Tory-heartland of Alberta, where 66 per cent of respondents said it was too intrusive, it is not surprising that the Conservative government has backed away from strongly supporting the proposed legislation.

...The poll, conducted February 23-24 and surveying 1,011 respondents on the polling firms online panel, found 53 per cent of Canadians believe the bill is too intrusive, compared to only 27 per cent who believe the it is necessary to fight online criminal activity...

Simply jaw-dropping.

Testament to the incredible ignorance of a very large portion of our society.

Re: Lawful Access articles - collection

"Despite being an extremely lengthy piece of legislation, Bill C-30 lacks the specificity that should accompany serious expansions to Canadian policing and intelligence gathering powers.

In this post, I first outline a subscriber data regime to discuss what does  and may  be entailed in accessing Canadians subscriber data. Second, I explain how subscriber data can be used for open-sourced intelligence gathering. Third, I argue that an administrative process of expanding subscriber identifiers is inappropriate. Finally, I articulate why warrants are so important, and why court approval should precede access to subscriber data. In aggregate, this post explicates the concerns that many civil advocates, academics, and technical experts have with access to subscriber information, why Canadians should be mindful of these concerns, and why Canadians should rebuff current efforts to expand warrantless access to subscriber information.

....

Imagine that your IP address has been turned over by a web forum that predominantly communicates about your local Occupy movement. With the IP in hand, the authorities (a) go to your ISP to identify you as an individual; (b) identify that on Wikipedia you have been editing articles on firebombs, chemical explosives, anarchism, black block tactics, and academic freedom. While this might suggest that you are of interest to police  and thus worth monitoring, if not charging with a specific criminal offence  it might mask the truth that you are really a graduate student who is a subject matter expert on militant advocacy in Canada. Youve been profiled based on actions online, with certain conclusions derived from your online behaviour that would not bear out were you subject to a specific investigation. While some of the confusion might work itself out in a court process, should you simply be monitored this profile could develop and build over time. This inappropriate characterization could lead to serious life consequences as the hidden profile influences your relations with the state over months or years." [You could find yourself on an international Do-Not-Fly list, a quiet word could be whispered to deny you a job, ....or worse if you manage to cross a border someplace where they practice extrajudicial detention & interrogation]

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nations cable landing stationsthe more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the countrylarge, windowless buildings known as switchesthus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. I think theres 10 to 20 of them, Binney says. Thats not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.

The eavesdropping on Americans doesnt stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&Ts powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creeks three 105-foot dishes handle much of the countrys communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the companys Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

Since the NSA scoops up everything that crosses the US border, and since much of Rogers & Sympatico carried e-mail & other traffic crosses into the US before it is re-routed back into Canada, a simple and cost-effective solution to this